1. Field of the Invention
An aspect of this disclosure relates to an information processing system, an information processing apparatus, and a data conversion method.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a so-called “pull-printing” system, print jobs received from terminals such as personal computers (PC) are not immediately printed but stored in an information processing apparatus such as a print server, and a logged-in user selects a print job from a list of the stored print jobs and prints the selected print job on an image forming apparatus such as a multifunction peripheral.
For example, Japanese Patent No. 4178823 discloses a pull-printing system where a server performs rendering and format conversion on content data specified by a client based on specification information of a client-side printing apparatus to generate print data that the client-side printing apparatus can print, and sends the generated print data to the client-side printing apparatus.
In such a pull-printing system, when a terminal enters a print job in an information processing apparatus, the terminal does not generally specify an image forming apparatus on which the print job is to be printed. Meanwhile, image forming apparatuses in a pull-printing system may support different printer languages (or page description languages).
Thus, since image forming apparatuses used for printing are not specified when print jobs are entered in a pull-printing system and different image forming apparatuses may support different page description languages, it is difficult to prepare print data before an image forming apparatus used for printing is selected. Meanwhile, if print data is generated after a request is received from an image forming apparatus (or an image forming apparatus is selected), the image forming apparatus needs to wait for the completion of the print data generation (or rendering) process before starting a printing process. As a result, the total printing time is increased.
To prevent this problem in a pull-printing system that supports multiple page description languages, it may be possible to prepare plural sets of print data in different page description languages in advance. However, this approach increases the time to generate print data, increases a storage area necessary to store the print data, and thereby increases the costs of a pull-printing system.
As another approach to prevent the above problem in a pull-printing system that supports multiple page description languages, it may be possible to prepare print data in a default page description language in advance and if an image forming apparatus selected for printing does not support the default page description language, to generate (or render) print data again in another page description language that the selected image forming apparatus supports. With this approach, however, since it is necessary to generate (or render) print data again when a selected image forming apparatus does not support the default page description language, the total printing time may still increase.